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As appealing as the title of the article is, I basically came away from this piece feeling like I had just read a snarkier, less useful version of Paul Graham's

by ex3xu 7y ago

As appealing as the title of the article is, I basically came away from this piece feeling like I had just read a snarkier, less useful version of Paul Graham's essay on moral fashion [0] back from 2004. The problem with following fashion, as far as I understand, is that you accept the tacit assumption that the value of an idea is correlated with its popularity, and I'm all in favor of smiting the very dangerous contrapositive to that assumption: that unpopular ideas therefore must also lack value. I support this author as far as he is attempting to raise awareness of this trap -- lest someone else have to go through the same fate as Ignaz Semmelweis, Guglielmo Marconi, or James Allison. But I felt like this article did little to present valid mechanisms to mitigate the risks of fashion, and instead spent most of the text attacking fashionable ideas simply for being fashionable, operating under the assumption that fashion itself necessarily lacks substance and causes problems on its own. I think this sort of hipster approach is as big of a risk as blindly following fashion -- both premises assume that popularity is necessary and sufficient to determine the value, or lack of value, of an idea. But maybe I'm just a blind fashion follower myself, since I felt so personally attacked when the author criticized MOOCs as just another fashionable fad -- despite the valid criticisms he linked to, I felt like I got a lot of value out of them, after all. [0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

hyperpallium 7y ago
Popularity implies adequacy in needed aspects, nothing more.
nn3 7y ago
It's a bit too much to ask him to provide a "cure for fashion". That's just difficult. I guess if he could do that it would be an exciting new research area and it would quickly become fashionable fashionable by itself, until it turns into a farce.
paultopia 7y ago
Oh good heavens, Graham's essay is wrongheaded. He encourages one to look for "taboo" ideas, and declares that one should train oneself to consider them. But he describes "taboo" ideas as an explicit result of a power struggle with no relationships to truth: The most conspiracy-theory-esque passages: 1. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true. 2. So if you want to figure out what we can't say, look at the machinery of fashion and try to predict what it would make unsayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his parents), which of their ideas would he tend to reject? What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying? Here's the problem with this: it totally ignores the possibility of social learning (well, to be fair, he doesn't completely ignore that possibility, he just dismisses it in a couple of sentences), and with it, social learning about how some bad ideas can be particularly dangerous. Here's an example. Anti-Semitism. Clearly a "taboo" idea in the sense that people get punished for uttering it; moreover, part of the reason that people get punished for uttering it is because those of us doing the punishing (myself included) are worried that people might start believing it. But we're not worried that people might start believing it because we're worried it's true! I'm pretty sure I speak for essentially all other enforcers of that particular taboo when I say that we know that the claims that anti-Semites make are quite false indeed. (I'm assuming here that we're talking about the parts of anti-Semitic thought that make claims to be the sort of thing that can be true or false, like financial conspiracy theories.) Rather, we're worried that people might start believing it because we know history! We know that anti-Semitism is a belief system that is very easily exploited by evil people, who use it to trick people who are casting about for someone to blame for their misfortunes into finding an enemy and then giving the evil people political power in order to attack them. Because we know that anti-Semitism has that kind of mind-virus property (more like a mind-biological-weapon), we come down hard on people who utter anti-Semitic things. It has nothing to do with secretly worrying that they might be true. The same is the case for lots of other taboo beliefs. (I can think of several that I don't want to mention, because I know that doing so will derail the subsequent conversation with deluded people saying "well, that COULD be true." But, again, historically, those beliefs have contributed to massively evil behaviors and I don't want to contribute to their propagation even indirectly.)
- aalleavitch 7y ago
  The problem is that the likeliness of the uninformed person to believe something they've heard has depressingly little to do with how likely that thing is to be true. A critical examination of the facts is something humans will avoid until it is absolutely unavoidable; we have an array of other heuristics we'll gladly jump to over expending costly mental effort evaluating something for truth.
- 0815test 7y ago
  Do people really 'get punished' for believing, e.g. financial conspiracy theories? I really have to dispute this. People believe (or rather, affect a belief) in these things because they get socially rewarded from holding/affecting such beliefs, not because they've carefully weighed the evidence one way or the other. So it seems that pg is still right on balance - yes, some people may be trying to offset this social reward via some sort of punishment, but what I am disputing is that this has been done strongly enough to tip these ideas into the overall "socially punished" bucket.
- wisty 7y ago
  > part of the reason that people get punished for uttering it is because those of us doing the punishing (myself included) are worried that people might start believing it I think this is the irrational part people are detecting. Yes a few thousand idiots on the internet believe some anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, and a few more joke about it, but it's simply not something anyone remotely normal accepts. People also say that gingers don't have souls, but even that's not something that would be healthy to worry about.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    Those numbers are far underestimated, and grow exponentially when you consider all of the other types of scapegoating conspiracy theories that attack other groups of people on the internet.
- ex3xu 7y ago
  I mean, I don't think Graham is advocating at all for actively harmful beliefs. He's advocating for the explicit understanding of why these beliefs are harmful, rather than using the fact that they are taboo as an explicit justification for criticism. Because as taboo as anti-Semitism is now, showing any kind of support for Jews was just as taboo under the Third Reich. We come down hard on anti-Semitic people not because they are breaking a taboo, but because anti-Semitism carries the risk of active harm for a whole class of undeserving individuals. We aren't secretly worried that it might be true because we can take the effort to understand the principles behind this particularly well-understood example of tribalistic hate speech. Take a look at something like Chomsky's political speech attacking NAFTA and neoliberalism in the 1990s, which Graham briefly alludes to. NAFTA was and remains a fairly popular initiative for the liberal establishment, but the principles under which Chomsky's justification stands can be imagined to hold up under scrutiny decades in the future, whereas exploitation of cheap Mexican labor -- probably not so much, I'd wager. Another recent example -- Raghuram Rajan's 2005 paper [0] criticizing the financial innovations that would go on to destroy the world economy in the 2008 crash. This example satisfies the two "conspiracy-theory-esque" conditions that you cite from Graham, as he certainly made Kohn, Greenspan, Summers, and other major figures in the economic establishment angry enough to call him a "Luddite" with views that would qualify under Graham's "unsayable" criteria. At least, before he would be proven right just a few years later. So you're certainly correct in pointing out that not every instance of taboo carries ideas worth considering -- and for some ideas, this is indeed a dangerous understatement -- but I don't agree with you when you imply that Graham is wrongheaded in every instance, and no taboos should ever be considered. To give another example, Joyce's Ulysses was banned as obscenity across the world in the 1920s [1]. As far as I can tell, Graham is more concerned with scientific innovations rather than political speech, anyway. [0]: https://www.nber.org/papers/w11728 https://www.nber.org/papers/w11728 [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/04/most-dangerous-james-joyces-ulysees-kevin-birmingham-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/04/most-dangerous...

by ex3xu 7y ago

hyperpallium 7y ago

Popularity implies adequacy in needed aspects, nothing more.

nn3 7y ago

It's a bit too much to ask him to provide a "cure for fashion". That's just difficult. I guess if he could do that it would be an exciting new research area and it would quickly become fashionable fashionable by itself, until it turns into a farce.

paultopia 7y ago

Oh good heavens, Graham's essay is wrongheaded. He encourages one to look for "taboo" ideas, and declares that one should train oneself to consider them. But he describes "taboo" ideas as an explicit result of a power struggle with no relationships to truth: The most conspiracy-theory-esque passages: 1. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true. 2. So if you want to figure out what we can't say, look at the machinery of fashion and try to predict what it would make unsayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his parents), which of their ideas would he tend to reject? What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying? Here's the problem with this: it totally ignores the possibility of social learning (well, to be fair, he doesn't completely ignore that possibility, he just dismisses it in a couple of sentences), and with it, social learning about how some bad ideas can be particularly dangerous. Here's an example. Anti-Semitism. Clearly a "taboo" idea in the sense that people get punished for uttering it; moreover, part of the reason that people get punished for uttering it is because those of us doing the punishing (myself included) are worried that people might start believing it. But we're not worried that people might start believing it because we're worried it's true! I'm pretty sure I speak for essentially all other enforcers of that particular taboo when I say that we know that the claims that anti-Semites make are quite false indeed. (I'm assuming here that we're talking about the parts of anti-Semitic thought that make claims to be the sort of thing that can be true or false, like financial conspiracy theories.) Rather, we're worried that people might start believing it because we know history! We know that anti-Semitism is a belief system that is very easily exploited by evil people, who use it to trick people who are casting about for someone to blame for their misfortunes into finding an enemy and then giving the evil people political power in order to attack them. Because we know that anti-Semitism has that kind of mind-virus property (more like a mind-biological-weapon), we come down hard on people who utter anti-Semitic things. It has nothing to do with secretly worrying that they might be true. The same is the case for lots of other taboo beliefs. (I can think of several that I don't want to mention, because I know that doing so will derail the subsequent conversation with deluded people saying "well, that COULD be true." But, again, historically, those beliefs have contributed to massively evil behaviors and I don't want to contribute to their propagation even indirectly.)

aalleavitch 7y ago
The problem is that the likeliness of the uninformed person to believe something they've heard has depressingly little to do with how likely that thing is to be true. A critical examination of the facts is something humans will avoid until it is absolutely unavoidable; we have an array of other heuristics we'll gladly jump to over expending costly mental effort evaluating something for truth.
0815test 7y ago
Do people really 'get punished' for believing, e.g. financial conspiracy theories? I really have to dispute this. People believe (or rather, affect a belief) in these things because they get socially rewarded from holding/affecting such beliefs, not because they've carefully weighed the evidence one way or the other. So it seems that pg is still right on balance - yes, some people may be trying to offset this social reward via some sort of punishment, but what I am disputing is that this has been done strongly enough to tip these ideas into the overall "socially punished" bucket.
wisty 7y ago
> part of the reason that people get punished for uttering it is because those of us doing the punishing (myself included) are worried that people might start believing it I think this is the irrational part people are detecting. Yes a few thousand idiots on the internet believe some anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, and a few more joke about it, but it's simply not something anyone remotely normal accepts. People also say that gingers don't have souls, but even that's not something that would be healthy to worry about.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  Those numbers are far underestimated, and grow exponentially when you consider all of the other types of scapegoating conspiracy theories that attack other groups of people on the internet.
ex3xu 7y ago
I mean, I don't think Graham is advocating at all for actively harmful beliefs. He's advocating for the explicit understanding of why these beliefs are harmful, rather than using the fact that they are taboo as an explicit justification for criticism. Because as taboo as anti-Semitism is now, showing any kind of support for Jews was just as taboo under the Third Reich. We come down hard on anti-Semitic people not because they are breaking a taboo, but because anti-Semitism carries the risk of active harm for a whole class of undeserving individuals. We aren't secretly worried that it might be true because we can take the effort to understand the principles behind this particularly well-understood example of tribalistic hate speech. Take a look at something like Chomsky's political speech attacking NAFTA and neoliberalism in the 1990s, which Graham briefly alludes to. NAFTA was and remains a fairly popular initiative for the liberal establishment, but the principles under which Chomsky's justification stands can be imagined to hold up under scrutiny decades in the future, whereas exploitation of cheap Mexican labor -- probably not so much, I'd wager. Another recent example -- Raghuram Rajan's 2005 paper [0] criticizing the financial innovations that would go on to destroy the world economy in the 2008 crash. This example satisfies the two "conspiracy-theory-esque" conditions that you cite from Graham, as he certainly made Kohn, Greenspan, Summers, and other major figures in the economic establishment angry enough to call him a "Luddite" with views that would qualify under Graham's "unsayable" criteria. At least, before he would be proven right just a few years later. So you're certainly correct in pointing out that not every instance of taboo carries ideas worth considering -- and for some ideas, this is indeed a dangerous understatement -- but I don't agree with you when you imply that Graham is wrongheaded in every instance, and no taboos should ever be considered. To give another example, Joyce's Ulysses was banned as obscenity across the world in the 1920s [1]. As far as I can tell, Graham is more concerned with scientific innovations rather than political speech, anyway. [0]: https://www.nber.org/papers/w11728 https://www.nber.org/papers/w11728 [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/04/most-dangerous-james-joyces-ulysees-kevin-birmingham-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/04/most-dangerous...